I am a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. I work mainly in metaphysics, social philosophy, and feminist theory, and on related topics in philosophy of language and epistemology. I have written on questions related to essence and modality, response-dependence, realism and anti-realism, naturalism, sex and gender, and social construction, and recently completed a book on the metaphysics of social categories, entitled Categories We Live By, published by Oxford University Press.

A note on my name: Icelanders don't have surnames and our names best treated like that of medieval or ancient European names (think of Hildegard of Bingen). This causes considerable confusion in academic publishing because databases treat my patronymic like a name. For this reason from 2017 on I publish under "Ásta" only. My suggestion for citing my earlier work is this: Ásta 2008 (published under "Ásta Sveinsdóttir"). ​I also hope that people looking for the Icelandic philosopher Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir can find this page.